With COP 28 just around the corner and as pressure builds across the globe to slash carbon emissions, increasingly powerful calls and commitments designed to accelerate the pace of green energy change are on the table.
Most of us involved in energy are aware of the alleged Big Oil claim that higher hydrocarbon profits are necessary to provide the means to finance the Energy Transition.
News this month that Cromarty and the Firth of Forth have been chosen to become Scotland’s green freeports was unquestionably a bitter pill to swallow for the energy sector in North-east Scotland.
Driven by society’s need to tackle climate change, renewable energy-based power generation is growing exponentially worldwide and especially in Europe where wind power alone now accounts for around 16% of capacity.
In 2014, when involved in developing Aberdeen Renewable Energy Group’s roughly 100MW Aberdeen Bay Windfarm plan, I and other members of the team were offered a briefing on a new way of bidding projects designed to drive down prices.
Yesterday's announcement by Sunak was far from destructive for the North Sea oil & gas industry given the generous projects investment tax relief, but it fails, as it turns out, in at least one critical way.
“Put simply, a just transition is about moving to an environmentally sustainable economy (that’s the ‘transition’ part) without leaving workers in polluting industries behind,” says NGO Greenpeace
Reach back 20 years and there was much excitement about the idea that renewables would kick open the doorway to distributed energy; the notion that power generation would be somehow spread equitably throughout the land and be friendly.
It has been more than 20 years in the making, but at last Aberdeen has got its big chance to prove that it really can become a major player in offshore renewables and especially wind.
Not many days ago, a Scottish MSP said the Holyrood government ought to revive an initiative originally set up in 2015 to protect and sustain oil and gas jobs at a time of crisis.
I can imagine the expletives uttered the length and breadth of the North West Europe Continental Shelf as folk across the offshore oil & gas industry woke up this morning … from operators right down the food chain to the smallest service companies.
“Demand for oil will peak in 2022, driven by expectations for a surge in prominence of light electric vehicles, accounting for 50% of new car sales globally by 2035.”